In recent years, the use of conveyors in product forming, processing, and packaging operations has proliferated. Conveyors are now frequently employed as an efficient manner of moving products from one location in a production facility to another. Moreover, systems employing multiple lanes of conveyors serve to significantly improve production efficiency by permitting the simultaneous transport of product for downstream processing at single or multiple workstations throughout the facility. In addition, product laning advantageously maximizes the use of plant floor space.
Many product forming or processing operations, such as, for example, the baking or freezing of food items, are best performed on a stream of product arranged in random fashion on a relatively wide conveyor. To achieve the desirable product handling and processing, the product stream must then be separated into discrete lanes, such as for packaging. Forming these lanes has presented some difficulty in the past. This is primarily because the baking or freezing processing leaves the product in the random disarray. Simply placing a series of receiving conveyors adjacent to a feeder conveyor to form the product into lanes is not an acceptable solution, since any product not in near-perfect alignment with the respective receiving conveyor will not fall directly onto the conveying surface. This is particularly troublesome for several reasons.
First of all, if the adjacent receiving conveyors are diverging, any off-center product resting partially on one conveyor or between two adjacent conveyors will fall to the floor as spreading occurs. In food processing operations, this creates both waste and an unsanitary condition that requires clean-up. Additionally, product not falling to the floor may instead become lodged between the adjacent receiving conveyors. Subsequent product flow can "hang up" on this lodged product and form a jam, which will require deleterious production downtime to clear. Furthermore, downstream workstations depend on the product being perfectly positioned on the surface of the conveyor for performing the processing operation. Significant deviations from this condition can result in product being misformed, damaged or perhaps even destroyed.
In an attempt to improve the ability of conveyor systems to form the desirable lanes of product, the use of passive guide rails positioned between adjacent pairs of receiving conveyors has been proposed. One example of such a system is U.S. Pat. No. 4,860,882 to Maeda et al., which provides a series of conveyors, each comprised of a separate carrier units for transporting round product, such as fruit. Raised passive guide rails between the receiving conveyors deflect any misaligned product in a single plane onto the individual carrier units. Out-feed conveyors receive the product and transport it away for further processing.
While suitable for product that is capable of rolling, it should be appreciated that such passive guide rails do not serve to deflect product having substantial flat surfaces, such as, for example, frozen pancakes or the like. Such product items can come to rest against any passive guide rail, which increases the incidence of deleterious jams. Due to the fact that a great number of operations for which lane forming is desirable involve products having flat surfaces (e.g. wafer-like or disc-shaped foods, small square packages, or flat boxes), the conveyor system described in the '882 patent offers little improvement over the conventional solution described above.
Accordingly, a need is identified for a conveyor system that receives randomly spaced product and forms discrete product lanes for further processing. The system would partially lift and actively deflect any misaligned product onto the conveying surface of adjacent receiving conveyors to form the respective product lanes. Additionally, the system would be adaptable for forming any number of product lanes for any sized batch of product.